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He had spoken as though determinedly gay, cheering one sick; and now there was purpose in the indirect reference to her family, as of a relic of embitterment.

Ada Lethen laughed. 'Do I seem so quiet? I assure you it's not because I don't appreciate, in all the word means, that you are here. Only the other day mother was speaking to me of you.'

'Did she?'

His eagerness was based, again, upon imagined changes during his absence. But it was no time yet to stake anything on the possible discovery of what had taken place in that house. 'I hope Mrs. Lethen has been in good health lately?'

'Not exactly. She never is, of course, that would be too much to expect. Lately at times she seems better, and then a day or a week will come when she alarms me.' Though the voice was soft, her articulation was definite and precise, her manner quietly explanatory, so that Richard Milne at moments fancied he was in a dream, not there, that far away she, like himself, sat alone.

He saw the real image of her as she sat alone, while seasons passed. How else should she sit, though her reason for being in that house always had been to keep from loneliness the father and mother whose estrangement had been one of the legends of his childhood? In itself that was enough to make for loneliness, and he marvelled at her endurance, her poised good sense. With the coming of womanhood, should she not feel free? But she could not believe in freedom.